17 - Red In Tooth And Claw

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The “Hell Creek parade”, displaying all fossil species from the Hell Creek Formation for the videogame Saurian. Four species featured here have already been introduced in this story: Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus, and Ankylosaurus. But the mystery theropod referenced a few chapters ago is in this picture, as well.

The process of cloning an extinct species is not as linear as people might assume.

While many fossils are of relatively secure attribution, others are harder to identify. Sometimes, bones from different animals will lead to chimerism: mistaking two partially fossilised animals for one individual. Other times, remains will be too fragmentary to place with any degree of certainty.

InGen and Dr Wu first ran into this issue when harvesting genetic material from a set of bones recovered from the Hell Creek Formation. The bones, attributed to a relatively small theropod (by dinosaur standard) had not yet been described at the time, so InGen was literally taking a stab in the dark. (1)

As it turned out, the harvesting and incubation succeeded, and a new species of Mesozoic dinosaurs joined the growing menagerie on Sorna.

In adulthood, the animal would be as tall as an adult human male, and over five metres in length. A fearsome predator built for pursuing prey larger than itself, and well-equipped to go in for the kill. But in its birth, the fuzzy hatchling was only slightly bigger than a baby chicken.

The precocious, fully feathered newborn soon began hunting for bugs to feed on. They could flap their feathered arms to aid themselves jumping on and off elevated positions, and at least while they were small, they were proficient tree climbers - a trait they would lose in adulthood.

All dinosaurs on Sorna were a mystery of course, but this creature didn’t even have a name. Rather unoriginally, Hammond elected to name it based on the location of its discovery: Dakotaraptor. (2)

The revelation that Dakotaraptor was indeed a Dromaeosaurid - a family more colloquially known to the general public as raptors - brought great elation to Hammond and Wu. This was one of their definite must-haves in any future park, both to fill the “small predator” niche from a visitor’s point of view, and because of the great expectations placed upon raptors on their part. (3)

What little pop-science knowledge Hammond possessed about dinosaurs was greatly informed by the Dinosaur Renaissance.

This scientific and cultural phenomenon was broadly correct in refuting what had been the consensus of the 1960s - that dinosaurs were slow, stupid, lumbering reptiles. Instead, they should be interpreted as complex and versatile vertebrates, able to colonise many environments, conduct active lifestyles, care for their young, and interact socially. (4)

Where the Renaissance was inevitably limited was in the actual details. Often, dinosaurs were simply reimagined on the baselines of mammalian behaviour, which a human-centric view tends to identify as “the standard”. (5)

Protective and affectionate parents rearing their cubs over long periods of time, packs with social structures that included dominance mechanics (themselves often a fallacy, as famously in the case of wolves), and so on. Reality was different. Birds and crocodiles too show parental care and complex social behaviour, but quite of a different nature compared to elephants or wolves. (6)

No dinosaur group was at the centre of this revolution more than raptors, thanks to a few truly remarkable fossil discoveries. (7) Soon, the public perception of raptor was that of a social and highly intelligent animal, built for jumping and running, that lived and hunted in packs.

As it turned out, Dakotaraptor fit next to none of these expectations. While broadly more agile and speed-oriented than some of its other raptor relatives, it was no Mesozoic cheetah, but rather an ambush predator, built to kill prey much larger than itself.

The fearsome sickle claws on its feet would not be used to slash, but to pierce like a harpoon, allowing the raptor to climb atop its chosen prey, stay there, and use the teeth and hand-claws to finish the kill - often beginning to feed when the weakened prey was still alive, and feebly struggling. (8)

The animal’s intelligence was also not particularly noteworthy compared to other carnivorous dinosaurs.

These discrepancies between reality and expectation would become clear in time, but the more immediately impactful was the social element. Fully expecting them to be pack animals, InGen cloned eight Dakotaraptors, and housed them in the same enclosure.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The animals tolerated one another as hatchlings, but never seemed particularly close together. As they grew, their relations became clearly frosty. Muldoon couldn’t figure out why the raptors seemed constantly stressed and on the verge of breakdown, but it made them harder and harder to approach on part of the staff, with no clear or immediate solution.

Unknown to him at the time, this, too, was a tragedy waiting to happen.

Footnotes:

(1) Chimerism is an extremely common problem when it comes to fossil finds. Ironically, the species being described and illustrated in this chapter might also turn out to be invalid, or at least need some revision, as its furcula apparently belongs to a turtle. Even so, indeterminate dromaeosaurid fossils definitely do exist in the Hell Creek Formation, so I feel confident enough in having a Hell Creek-cloned “raptor” in the story.

(2) Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a bit on the nose that I’m giving this animal the same name it would get years later in our timeline. But really, geographic toponym + “raptor” is hardly the most original name combination, and Hammond would certainly be happy with featuring a species he gets to call raptor, given the obvious marketing appeal of the name.

This is as far as the genus goes, though the species name would possibly be different. In the real world, the specific name is D. steini, in honour of palaeontologist Walter Stein. I don’t really see Hammond doing this - he’d probably name the species after himself, InGen, or maybe Isla Sorna.

(3) From an authorial perspective, I thought Dakotaraptor would be a great choice to replace the generic, non-existent “raptors” of the original Jurassic Park. Its size range is perfect, and it came from the same time and location as Tyrannosaurus. Here is a reconstruction by Emily Willoughby, and here is the in-game appearance and fact sheet for Dakotaraptor in Saurian, where it’s a playable dinosaur.

(3) This was at once a scientific and a cultural movement, and led to the production of a variety of entertainment and media works, from the more niche ones like Raptor Red to of course the biggest of them all, the original Jurassic Park.

(4) This is really the point where science and ideology, or human preconceptions more broadly, interfere. There was a certain tension to prove that dinosaurs were “like mammals”, that is to say warm-blooded, intelligent, capable of living socially, etc. This of course rests on the underlying assumption that mammalian life is as good as it gets.

(5) Now that it is broadly accepted that dinosaurs were not, in fact, primitive, stupid, and doomed to extinction, we have been able to move past these cultural aspects of the Dinosaur Renaissance, and evaluate them more critically. To the point, it’s quite unlikely that “raptors” were pack hunters. But this certainly isn’t an indictment of the animal, and doesn’t make it primitive or stupid. We can evaluate dinosaurs on their own terms, rather than use mammals as the yardstick for vertebrate faunas of all kinds.

(6) The most famous of these was John Ostrom’s Deinonychus Quarry 1. Deinonychus was a dromaeosaurid, first described by Ostrom in 1969, and it can’t be underestimated how much it revolutionised the scientific and cultural understanding of dinosaurs at the time.

Here was a small predator that looked fast and agile, and because Ostrom found several individuals buried together in association with the remains of ornithopod Tenontosaurus, it was long assumed that this represented direct fossil evidence of a pack hunt.

The extraordinary fossil find is one of the most depicted scenes in the history of paleoart - to pick one among many, here is a painting by Rushelle Kucala. Having said that, taphonomy offers alternate explanations for the quarry.

The fact that many Deinonychus were together, and died in the proximity of a Tenontosaurus, does not necessarily mean that they hunted it together, or at all. Like palaeontologist Andrea Cau has noted, if this assembly of vultures shredding a red deer carcass were to fossilise, it wouldn’t look much different from Deinonychus Quarry 1.

(7) This is only one potential hypothesis for how dromaeosaurids hunted. It’s called raptor prey restraint, and you can learn more about it here.